This paper compares the American poets, Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton, with the contemporary Indian poets, Shanta Acharya and Deepa Agarwal, bringing to light, in the process, their patterns of images, thought processes, cultural contexts, emotions, and attitudes—in short, all that contributes to the making of their poems. The said poets are not just a part of each of their respective national identity, but they also uphold their universals as individuals, artists, and sensible beings, participating in the gendered experiences. That apart, the paper also shows the woman in each one of them with all the dissimilarities in their feelings and perceptions.

Although culturally different from each other, there are poets from both America and India who have some thematic similarities relating to life, vision, and the journey of the self. An attempt is made here to compare the American poets, Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton, with the contemporary Indian poets, Shanta Acharya and Deepa Agarwal, focusing on all that contributes to the making of their poems—patterns of images, thought processes, cultural contexts, emotions and attitudes, and their feelings and sensibilities as women.

Adrienne Rich has been commended for writing ‘good’ poetry when her poems were extremely docile and accused of having a political axe to grind whenever she was insistent about her convictions. In his Foreword to Rich’s first volume, A Change of World (Rich 1951), eminent poet W H Auden praises her thus: “The poems a reader will encounter in this book are neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed down by them, and do not tell fibs.” And then there is Boyers (1973) who accuses Rich of “the will to be contemporary,” that is, being desperately assertive in her need to be accepted. Answers to questions raised by such paradoxical reactions can be found by examining the poetic microcosm of Rich. By poetic microcosm, we mean the accredited poetic creation of Rich in its relation to the nonverbal reality, that is, its reference to the world of natural objects and events.

American Literature Journal, Amor in Pound, Classical European Literature, Homosexuality, Diastasis, Olga-Circe-Artemis, Heterosexual Love, Homosexual Love.